‘A Global Image on the Way Down’

Assessing the significance of the Pew Research Center survey of attitudes towards America, Robert Levine breaks the story into four questions: "Why don't they like us? Should we care? What can we do about it? What should we do about it?" Each of these questions needs to be carefully considered by all Americans, especially those in charge, he writes, but answers are not easy. On issues such as the war on terrorism and the Iraq conflict, for example, "views depend on a calculus that weighs America's image, the balance between decreasing terrorism and other values such as national and international civil liberties, and the imminence of the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Analysis provides no answers. Politics provides the appropriate venue." As a whole, he concludes, "The bottom-line answer" to these questions is "We Americans should take some steps to change our image, but they will have a marginal effect at best." – YaleGlobal